Spelfabet

Tell publishers to stop selling predictable texts for early literacy!

Someone from a major educational publisher rang me today to extol the virtues of their new range of decodable texts for beginning readers. I think she was hoping I might help promote them.

I’ve had a look at their decodables, but haven’t bought any for our decodable books display, because (A) our budget is tight, (B) I’ve been fairly underwhelmed by the new decodables from mainstream publishers I have bought, and (C) the last time I checked, they were still selling predictable/repetitive texts.

The only thing I like about predictable/repetitive texts for beginning readers is making spoof AI ones:

I consider predictable/repetitive texts harmful products for vulnerable beginners. Anyone who works in literacy intervention can tell you that undoing the bad habits encouraged by these books is hard work. They encourage children to memorise and guess words, not decode them. Here’s a daggy video I made nearly a decade ago explaining what’s wrong with them:

As education academics Simmone Pogorzelski, Susan Main and Janet Hunter wrote in their excellent 2021 AARE blog post Decodable or predictable: why reading curriculum developers must seize one: “there is no instructional value in using ‘levelled’ predictable readers to support children’s development once formal reading instruction has commenced”.

Margaret Goldberg of the Right To Read Project has some great ideas for repurposing predictable/repetitive books already in schools. By now there should be no market for new predictable/repetitive books for beginning readers. Are they really still available? Check publisher/vendor websites for yourself, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.

If you’re speaking to publishers/vendors keen to get a slice of the booming decodable books market, but still selling predictable/repetitive texts, please tell them this is not smart marketing. It shows they’re newcomers to the difficult task of producing decodables, and not fully committed to teaching young kids to decode, not memorise and guess. If they want their decodables to be taken seriously, they need to ditch predictable/repetitive texts, or shift them to their EAL catalogues, for use in teaching vocabulary and sentence structure.

There’s now such a confusopoly of decodable texts available, I don’t envy teachers and librarians the task of deciding what to buy. I’m a bit confused myself, and we have heaps of them, we aren’t relying on website or catalogue information. Which are good quality? How many of each? Which ones are OK to use with older kids? What about struggling readers who will only read about gaming/unicorns/football/princesses/cars? Please share your thoughts and thorny questions in the comments.

Alison Clarke

Choosing a phonics sequence & decodable books

Phonics teaching sequences give an outline of which sound-spelling relationships are to be taught, and in what order. Most of them also include work on word-building with prefixes and suffixes. Schools in my state (Victoria, Australia) without a phonics teaching sequence must choose one this year, thanks to the Making Best Practice Common Practice announcement (applause).

A good phonics sequence works from simple to complex, separating similar sounds/spellings (like b/d), and targeting high-impact patterns first. Ideally, there are matching, high-quality teaching materials, and excellent training and support, readily available at a reasonable price.

Decodable texts allow children to practise what they’ve been taught in phonics lessons, without being tripped up by a whole lot of harder spellings. What we practise, we learn. The type of reading material given to young children can have at least as big an impact on their reading habits as what they’re taught in class (see this article, or this book), so decodable texts must be chosen carefully and wisely. This blog post aims to help with this decision-making.

Things supplier websites won’t tell you

Supplier websites provide lots of great information about decodables, but don’t say that some books offer limited opportunities to practise some targets, or include words that are quite hard for their intended readership. The ERA Books Phonics Decodables 1.0 and 1.1 Set 4 books ($8.95 each, so $35.80 for all 4) list ‘k’, ‘h’, ‘f’, ‘l’ and ‘j’ as letter-sound targets. The words suitable for absolute beginners in these four books are: ‘Kim’, ‘Kip’, ‘kid’, ‘him’, ‘had’, ‘hen’, ‘hug’, ‘hat’, ‘fit’, ‘fun’, ‘fed’, ‘lid’, ‘log’, ‘Jim’, ‘jam’, ‘jug’, and ‘jet’ (17 unique words, 44 total words). Some other words also contain the targets, but in difficult-for-beginners CVCC, CVCC, CCVCC or CVCCC* words: ‘help’, ‘frog’, ‘fits’, ‘lift’, ‘just’, ‘sink’, ‘help’, ‘milk’, ‘flips’, ‘lifts’, ‘jumps’ and ‘like’.

The Sunshine Decodables Series 1 Set 3 book “Mud fun” lists the following targets on its back cover: ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’, ‘j’, ‘qu’, ‘v’, ‘w’, ‘y’, ‘z’, ‘zz’, ‘ff’, ‘ll’, and ‘ss’. The only words containing these spellings I can find in the book are: ‘van’, ‘will’, ‘job’, ‘off’, ‘wets’, ‘wax’, and ‘kids’. No ‘c’, ‘ck’, ‘qu’, ‘y’, ‘z’, ‘zz’, or ‘ss’ words. The only ‘y’ words I can find in all ten Set 3 books are: ‘yes’ (two instances), and ‘yum’ (one instance). I wonder why they couldn’t work ‘yam’, ‘yap’, ‘yell’, ‘yet’ and ‘yuck’ in too. Writing good decodable books is hard work, and everyone who attempts it deserves some credit, but (call me old-fashioned) the phonics targets listed on the back of a book should actually be in that book, and in more than one or two words.

Free decodable book evaluation form

I’ve made a free decodable book evaluation form which I use in the 45 minute video below to evaluate a few of the many books which follow the Letters and Sounds phonics teaching sequence. This sequence was published by the UK government in 2007. I hope the form and video are useful to anyone feeling baffled by the confusopoly of decodable books now available, and needing a system to help them find lovely books that help their learners thrive. Sorry it’s quite a long video. If you’re time-poor and fairly familiar with the topic, crank up the speed using the little cog at bottom right, then just switch it back to normal speed for the most interesting bits. Making people sound like chipmunks also adds a bit of fun to the day.

Here are some examples of early years phonics teaching sequences, with links to matching decodable books and training providers. There’s no such thing as a perfect sequence, so please explore a variety of them, and related teaching materials and training, before choosing. Inclusion in this table does not constitute endorsement.

If you have a mixture of decodable books from various publishers/sequences, the NSW SPELD decodable book selectors can help you organise them into your preferred sequence. There’s also a free video training called Implementing a Systematic Synthetic Phonics approach on the government-funded Literacy Hub website, which has its own phonics sequence, but no decodable texts. Jocelyn Seamer runs early years phonics training and has program-agnostic resources. Free recordings of 2018 Victorian Dept of Ed webinars on synthetic phonics and related topics are also still available. The Five from Five website is also an amazing resource.

I hope all this is helpful to people choosing a phonics teaching sequence. I’m running small, hands-on workshops where you can have a Proper Look at a range of decodable books at the Spelfabet office in North Fitzroy this term, and try out my evaluation form on some (here’s the link to it again). Sorry it’s taken a while to get the workshops off the ground (life keeps thwacking me). Tickets to the sessions are not yet all in the website shop because of software glitches, but they will be by the end of the week.

Alison Clarke

PS The Spelfabet shop doesn’t sell decodable books suitable for absolute beginners, but has beginners’ quizzes, and Phonics with Feeling download-and-print decodables for kids in their second and third years of school (or later Foundation students). Also embedded picture mnemonics to help tinies learn basic sound-letter relationships, that two letters can represent a sound (sh/shell, oo/food), and that some sounds have shared spellings e.g. u/up (or u/undies, if you prefer) and u/unicorn.

^{* C = consonant, V = vowel. VC words include ‘in’, ‘at’ and ‘up. CVC words include ‘hot’, ‘sun’ and ‘fed’. CVCC words include ‘milk’, ‘help’ and ‘just’. CCVC words include ‘stop’, ‘from’, and ‘bent’. CCVCC words include ‘flips’, ‘trend’ and ‘stamp’. CVCCC words include ‘jumps’, ‘lifts’ and ‘grabs’. Please start beginners off with just VC and CVC words.}

_{** Sounds-Write now has Australian and US branches.}

Workshops comparing decodable books

Schools everywhere are replacing their predictable/repetitive texts for beginners/strugglers with decodable texts. Excellent. Kids need to practice decoding words, not guessing or rote-memorising them.

There’s been a recent market explosion of decodable books. I’ve just updated my website list, and discovered that the Reading League in the US has an even bigger list. My head is spinning. It would be very sad if people spent a lot of money on well-marketed, pretty, but pedagogically low-quality ones, then tried them out, didn’t like them, and went back to predictable/repetitive texts.

I’d like to be able to write a blog post giving my full and frank opinions about the range of decodables we have in the Spelfabet office. Well, maybe not the ones we keep at the bottom of the back cupboard. Unfortunately, we live in a litigious world, so I’d have to check such a blog post with a lawyer first.

However, I can invite locals to small workshops to have a Proper Look at these books, and discuss their features, advantages and disadvantages. After so much online learning and online shopping, that’d be a nice thing to do.

We’ve almost finished setting up our display of decodable books suitable for early years children in our workshops room, see photo above. My excellent colleagues Georgina Ryan and Elle Holloway have spent many hours preparing information sheets about each set of books, and I’m just finishing the task off.

I’ll be running a two-hour in-person, hands-on session about this display on Wednesday 22nd May from 1.30pm till 3.30pm, and more will be scheduled soon. Numbers are strictly limited to 20 people per session. If you work at a City of Yarra, Merri-Bek or Darebin school or local library (our local patch) please email info@spelfabet.com.au from your work address with the name of your school for a 50% discount code. Click here for a ticket.

We don’t have every available decodable book series, or full sets of every series, but once we’ve added a few new things, our early years display will include texts from:

• The Adventures of Doc Leeda (High Noon Books, US)
• Big Cat Phonics Practice, Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds (Collins, UK)
• Bug Club/Phonics Bug (Pearson, UK)
• Core Knowledge Language Arts readers (free printables, US)
• Cracking the ABC Code (Aus).
• Dandelion Launchers, Readers and World (nonfiction) books (Phonic Books, UK and US)
• Decodable Jewels (Aus)
• Decodable Readers Australia (Early Readers, Main Fiction, nonfiction, Aus)
• Dog on a Log (Let’s Go Books, US)
• ERA Phonics Decodables (Aus)
• Fitzroy Readers (Fitzroy Program, Aus)
• Flyleaf Emergent Reader Series and Reading Series, (UK), which are also free online.
• Get Reading Right (Aus)
• InitiaLit readers (Multilit, Aus)
• Jolly Phonics (Jolly Learning, UK)
• Junior Learning Letters and Sounds sequence books (UK)
• Little Learners Love Literacy Pip and Tim, Wiz Kids, Tam and Pat and Big World (nonfiction) books
• Little Sprouts (High Noon books, US)
• Mog and Gom (Smart Kids, Aus? UK?)
• Phonics With Feeling (printable decodables, available from this website, Aus)
• PLD Literacy (other publishers’ books reorganised into PLD teaching sequence, Aus)
• Pocket Rockets (Smart Kids, Aus)
• Preschool University (printable decodables, US)
• Reading Elephant (download-and-print stories, US)
• Power Readers and Supercharged Readers (Voyager Sopris, US)
• Reading Mates (Aus)
• Reading Stars (Ransom, UK)
• Rip Rap Club (Cumquatmay, Aus)
• Rising Stars Reading Planet (Hodder, UK)
• Simple Words books (US)
• SmartKids Decodable Fiction Collection (Aus? UK?)
• Snappy Sounds (Macmillan, Aus)
• Sound Waves (Firefly Press, Aus)
• Sounds Write (UK)
• SPELD SA Phonic book series for Jolly Phonics sequence and Sounds-Write sequence (Aus)
• Sunshine books – Decodable series (Aus)
• UFLI Foundations (US)
• Whole Phonics (US)

We also have the No Nonsense Phonics kit (UK) and iPads with decodable books as apps, and a projector to show you a few cool online things, like the new Reading Doctor decodable texts (hilarious pictures are on the following page, so you CAN’T guess from them!). Please note that the workshops will be about decodable books for youngsters, not older, catch-up readers (8+ years to adult). We’ll need another whole session or two to discuss them. Let us know if that’s of interest.

If you’re local and want to attend, but can’t do so on Wednesday afternoons, let us know when would suit you at info@spelfabet.com.au. You might also like to try the Decodable Book Selectors from NSW SPELD.

Alison Clarke

Speech Pathologist

Ten cheers for our new Children’s Laureate!

I was so excited to be invited to the launch of Sally Rippin’s two year program as Australian Children’s Laureate on Tuesday, though surprised to spot a former colleague in the crowd who was once staunchly anti-phonics and pro Reading Recovery/Fountas and Pinnell.

Then I realised: Sally is the Perzackly Perfect Person to cheer people off the sinking Balanced Literacy ship (especially since the Grattan Institute’s Reading Guarantee report), and onto ship Structured Literacy, so all kids can hurry up and start enjoying wonderful stories.

Sally isn’t just an author of great kids’ books, she’s the mum of a neurodivergent kid who struggled to read and spell, and a staunch advocate of making sure all kids are taught to crack our spelling code, instead of being encouraged to memorise and guess words. Her book for adults about this, Wild Things: how we learn to read, and what can happen if we don’t, should be in every school and local library. Here she is at the launch with queen of our activist dyslexia mums, Dyslexia Victoria Support founder Heidi Gregory.

Sally’s term as Children’s Laureate is the perfect time for a strong push to dump dross like predictable/repetitive texts and rote-memorisation of high frequency word lists, and promote things like decodable texts and systematic, explicit phonics teaching in Years F-2. It’s also the perfect time to improve early identification and intervention for neurodivergent kids in schools, and knock down barriers to reading for all kids.

The Grattan Institute report (there’s a podcast about it here, and a 20-minute YouTube summary here) says kids with poor literacy currently in school could cost taxpayers $40 billion over their lifetimes, not to mention the personal cost to those kids. I cannot think of a better use of my taxes than ensuring all schools use literacy-teaching methods that are based on the best available evidence, and that struggling and neurodiverse kids whose parents can’t afford high-quality private intervention don’t miss out on it.

At the launch I also got a copy of Come Over To My House, a picture book co-authored by Eliza Hull, full of stories about making the world more accessible for everyone. It’s perfect for our waiting room. I also got some School Of Monsters compilations for our lending library, signed by Sally and illustrator Chris Kennett (who also drew little bats on them). Chris taught everyone at the launch how to draw a monster, which was rather hilarious.

Sally will be travelling all over Australia in the next two years, so make sure you find out when she is coming to a town or city near you (the ACLF newsletter and social media information is here), and spread the word. It’s a story well worth telling.

New Phonics With Feeling books

The new Extended Code Set Eleven download-and-print Phonics With Feeling readers mean there are now a dozen sets of these affordable, decodable books (one Initial Code Review set, and 11 Extended Code sets).

Set Eleven has five volumes containing 13 short stories in verse. Its focus is less common consonant spellings like the ‘kn’ in ‘know’ and the ‘ch’ in ‘chorus’, so it’s suitable for students in Year 2 or early Year 3, or slightly older catch-up learners.

It can be difficult to find text which provides plenty of practice with less common patterns, but author and illustrator Gaia (AKA Teresa, but her grandkids call her Gaia, and she created the books for them) Dovey has a knack for weaving amusing stories including lots of words with (a) specific phoneme-grapheme correspondence(s). Great for repetition to mastery!

Like all PWF sets, there’s a parent/aide version which may be printed up to five times (40c per copy), or a bulk-priced teacher/clinician version, which may be printed up to thirty times (20c per copy). They download with printable quizzes about each book, or you can use the online quizzes.

The stories are:

Triceratops Stew (250 words)

• Revising c as in cent, introducing ce as in prince
• In this story, the reader is encouraged to try a ridiculously impossible recipe.

The Gentle Giant (277 words)

• Revising g as in giant, introducing ge as in change
• This giant is gentle and kind, but small animals need to be vigilant around him.

Missy Madge (121 words)

• Introducing dg as in budget, dge as in badge
• Missy Madge is a brave little donkey who goes everywhere with her owner.

The Animals and the Alphabet (179 words)

• Introducing ph as in alphabet
• Some animals at the zoo are learning the alphabet, and others are feeling left out.

The Giraffe Who Forgot How to Laugh (151 words)

• Introducing gh as in laugh
• Joseph the giraffe has had a tough time in the zoo, but there is a simple way to make his life easier.

Write About Wrong (221 words)

• Introducing wr as in wrong
• Proteus, the protector of the sea, wants to get a message to those people who don’t care about the earth or the ocean.

The Knitting Knight (92 words)

• Introducing kn as in knit
• This knight seems to be pretty good at knitting, but he is taking a long time to make a scarf.

The Gnarled Old Gnome (80 words)

Introducing gn as in gnome

• This old gnome is keen to travel, but when he visits the city, he doesn’t like it at all.

Chiara and the Cats’ Chorus (224 words)

• Introducing ch as in chorus
• The cats in the chorus want tiaras like Chiara’s, so she finds a way to make this possible.

Ghosts and Ghouls (93 words)

• Introducing gh as in ghosts
• On her brother’s advice, Sally creates a suitably ghastly costume for Hallowe’en.

Tom Crumb (125 words)

• Introducing mb as in crumb
• Tom does some silly things, but he also does something brave.

What About Whale? (124 words)

Revising wh as in whale

• This little poem reminds children that there are plenty of words beginning with wh, and draws attention to the way in which many of these words are onomatopoeic.

Priscilla (348 words)

• Introducing sc as in scissors, sce as in reminisce
• Priscilla is interested only in herself and in the fashion scene, but she learns the hard way about collaboration.

Like the other Phonics With Feeling readers, these readers have cohesive narratives, entertaining plots, engaging characters and themes worth talking about. We hope you like them!

Phonics With Feeling Set 10 now available

I’ve just put six brand new Set 10 Phonics With Feeling printable decodable readers into the Spelfabet website shop. Like all these books, they cost 40c per print to make 5 copies, or 20c per print to make 30 copies. You provide the paper/card, printer and assembly time, which of course adds to the real cost, but if you’re short of funds, these are a very affordable way to boost your library of decodable text.

New decodable books for ‘o as in love’ and ‘a’ as in ‘ball’

The spellings ‘o’ as in ‘love’ and ‘a’ as in ‘ball’ are in many words young children try to write. ‘One’, ‘love’, ‘some’, ‘once’, ‘all’, and ‘called’ are in the first 100 words on the Oxford Wordlist, ‘brother’, ‘other’, ‘come’, ‘water’, ‘also’, and ‘ball’, are in the 2nd 100, ‘won’ is number 206 and ‘small’ is number 228. *

However, these spelling patterns are often taught quite late in phonics teaching sequences. Many words containing these spellings are in early decodable book ‘tricky words’ lists.

Two new download-and-print Phonics With Feeling books allow children to practise words with these spellings, and notice the patterns in how they’re used: ‘love’, ‘dove’, ‘shove’, ‘glove’, ‘some’, ‘come’, ‘done’, ‘none’, ‘won’, ‘son’, ‘other’, ‘brother’, ‘mother’, ‘honey’, ‘money’ and ‘monkey, and ‘all’, ‘ball’, ‘call’, ‘fall’, ‘hall’, ‘mall’, ‘tall’, ‘wall’, ‘stall’, and ‘small’.

These new books expand the Extended Code Set 1 from three to five books. They otherwise contain only Initial Code spellings, plus the small number of ‘tricky words’ listed at the start of each book for pre-teaching. This means skilled teachers can slot them into phonics teaching sequences without introducing other, more difficult sound-spelling relationships.

The Monkeys’ Wedding

In Zulu, a sunshower is called umshado wezinkawu, meaning ‘monkey’s wedding’, so in some parts of Africa and the Caribbean, people say it’s a monkey’s wedding when the sun appears during rain. The new Phonics With Feeling Extended Code Set 1 book ‘The Monkeys’ Wedding’ is a cute, rhyming story of two monkeys in love whose wedding is almost spoilt by rain:

As well as giving children decoding and vowel-flexing practice, I love that this book offers an opportunity to discuss idioms, and that the idiom it refers to comes from a language and culture many English-speakers know little about.

Author and illustrator Gaia (AKA Teresa) Dovey has excelled herself with this book’s illustrations. The monkeys look fluffy enough to pat, and there are some gleefully naughty-looking little ones.

Up The Wall

The second new Extended Code Set 1 book, ‘Up The Wall’, also presents an opportunity to discuss literal and figurative meanings. It begins with a mother telling her children they’re driving her up the wall playing soccer in the hall, so they decide to go to the mall where there is a climbing wall. One child races to the top of the wall but then freezes, afraid he’ll fall. His mother must literally go up the wall to coax him, red-faced, back down. This series is not called Phonics With Feeling for nothing!

Free quizzes, and free upgrade if you have EC Set 1 already

Quizzes about these and all the other Phonics With Feeling books are available free on Wordwall, or you can download them here. Use them as is, or put some or all questions into Kahoots or other formats to suit your learners. There’s been a slight edit to the first Extended Code Set 1 book, Nancy Visits the City, which is reflected in its updated quiz, and a few other improvements across other books in the series.

Everyone who bought the original Extended Code Set 1 when it had only three books has been sent the new set of five books and updated quizzes via We Transfer. If that includes you, please download the files quickly, before the transfer expires, and let us know if you have difficulty.

Print up to 5 books @ 40c per copy, or up to 30 books @ 20c per copy

All the Phonics With Feeling books are available in either parent/aide sets (print up to 5 copies for 40c per print) or bulk teacher/clinician sets (print up to 30 copies for 20c per print). You provide the paper/card, printer and time printing and assembling them, so please factor these into your ‘is this good value?’ decision-making.

The Phonics With Feeling books aren’t for absolute beginners, as there are already plenty of good decodable books available for them. Some children will be able to read them towards the end of their first year of school, but they’re mostly for children in their second or third year of school, or slightly older catch-up learners.

More information about these books, including how to print and assemble them, can be found in this 2021 blog post. There is also an author interview here, and information about each book’s title, target spelling(s), number of words and plot in its entry in the Spelfabet shop. If you don’t already have the free sample book, it’s here.

* In the first 200 Oxford words containing a one-letter ‘o’ spelling, it is pronounced as in ‘got’ 15 times, as in ‘love’ 8 times, as in ‘so’ 7 times and as in ‘to’ 5 times.